UNLEASHING THE QUIET ‘BEAST’
AS IRON & WINE, SINGER-SONGWRITER SAM BEAM HAS WRITTEN OFTEN ABOUT TIME PASSING IN OUR LIVES.
Beam opened an early song, “Sodom, South Georgia,” with the line, “Papa died smiling, wide as the ring of a bell” — a heavy transitional moment reduced powerfully to just a few words.
A few years later, Beam painted his “The Trapeze Swinger” on a bigger canvas. Its nearly 10 minutes of stitched-together scenes make it the Sistine Chapel of songs about lost youthful love.
Beam’s new record, “Beast Epic,” presents him as a guy in his 40s trying to make sense of some of the same Big Question concerns, only with an additional decade-and-a-half of living.
Its very first line sets a certain tone: “Our winter keeps running us down.”
And on “Thomas County Law,” Beam muses, “There’s nowhere safe to bury all the time I’ve killed.”
That’s some burden. These songs contain deep and conflicted narratives about the joys and disappointments of life at the halfway point.
Presented with evidence that he’s just doing what he’s always done, only years later. Beam laughs.
“As I see it, our job is to get lost in our obsessions,” he says. “I’m just a guy who likes songs. And I like story songs. So that’s how I write. And a timeline may come out of that. But still, I keep coming back to each song, how each story plays out. Each one is its own little story. Some are more narrative than others. But that’s what I’m interested in, in life. Looking back on how decisions played out. Seeing pictures of old friends and knowing there’s more interesting things than just what is in the photo. We don’t know what’s around the corner, do we? That’s the experience I like to write about. Then and now.”
The album’s title suggests a feral grandiosity. In rock-crit parlance, this would be his “return to rock” album, but Beam being Beam, such a return means not an increase in sound but rather a decrease.
Fifteen years ago, Iron & Wine whispered its way to cultural renown with a set of bedroom demo recordings that were made public. Beam made noise with only the most basic tools — his gentle voice and guitar. Not surprisingly, he grew restless and ventured into louder and more ornamental music. When he titled a 2011 song “Walking Far From Home,” the phrase served that song’s particular narrative. But it also could have referred to Beam straying from a minimalist aesthetic.
The songs on “Beast” are as quiet as any he’s told since the first records he made. Which isn’t to say they lack fangs.
“Bitter Truth” contains a devastating line about long-term cohabitation: “Our missing pieces walked between us when we were moving thru the door. You called them mine, I called them yours.”
“I feel like I can’t answer you without getting in a lot of trouble,” Beam says, laughing. “That song is a combination of experience and imagination. And I won’t tell you how much of each.”
He does admit the song was shaken loose by something he heard said by Texas-based singersongwriter Jerry Jeff Walker. “He talked about a ‘getting even song,’ ” Beam says. “And I thought that phrase was so funny. And at the same time, I knew exactly what he was talking about.”
Beam’s “Beast” is interesting in that he draws from the ethereal and the real — ghosts and nature. His last album was titled “Ghost on Ghost,” and the new one opens with “Claim Your Ghost,” a connection he says is coincidental, “except that both find me getting lost in my obsessions.”
But more often, his reference points come from outside the home: songbirds, summer clouds, weeds and winter are all referenced in the first few songs.
“The natural world is just more interesting to me than phones and apps and (expletive),” he says. “This modern world is just a blink in the history of ourselves.”